~ My dad used to call me Fart Blossom, too.

Still Trying to Figure Out Farmville

… but only in the most meta of ways. Meaning: I’m not playing it. I just can’t bring myself to do so. I’ve been Googling phrases like “fun in Farmville” and “why Farmville is fun” and so on, to get a sense of what actual players think. So far, not much. There’s talk of leveling. There’s talk of prettifying. There’s talk of sharing. Thin gruel — but then, these aren’t people trying to analyze their own experience of fun. They’re just having it. Which is fine.

About ten links past where I started, though, I found this speech given by Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga, about the business model behind the product. I think he probably depends too much on an affected self-deprecating cynicism to get laughs from his audience of Berkeley digerati, which is why this speech ended up causing trouble for the company after it was released on the Internet, where the “temperature of the room” is always “boiling over ready to explode.”